IIRC Vesselin Bontchev studied this idea some years ago and presented a very good paper explaining why viral propagation of "white hat" code was a daft idea. May have been at EICAR '94 but I've long since lost my copy of proceedings.
Agree! Agree! It's the first game in years that's genuinely had me open-mouthed with delight. The Wii in general is a wonder - my last company was a games developer so we had all the platforms - I doubt if the rest put together got as much play time as the Wii.
Re:I prefer Debian and here's why...
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
Having recently had the misfortune to have to administer a Red Hat Enterprise* Linux box, I can't agree too strongly. It's a joke of a distribution compared to Debian and charging for it only adds insult to injury. If I ever want a wide selection of non-standard outdated packages to test application compatibility or something I'll know just where to look, though.
To be fair, I'm on a fixed IP (with working reverse DNS) on what must be one of the savviest ISPs on the planet ( http://aaisp.net.uk ) and I'm still seeing all sorts of crud from my fellow users on 81.2.x.x...
I note that unlike the t68i pages there's no obvious mention of battery life. I *love* my t68i and the number one toppermost-top feature is the battery. It has essentially removed the main irritation from my use of mobile phones. OTOH, others have reported problems with theirs, so perhaps I'm just a lucky fucker.
This new model, I'm guessing, will be much more like the t300[1] which had all the doodads but sucks as a phone because it has ~50% of the battery life.
Is there any particular reason you don't just get a generic optical mouse (such as the one, branded "Chic" that I'm using now)? They're functionally nigh-on indistinguishable from the basic MS or Logitech products so far as I can tell, and a fuck of a lot cheaper.
I have to say that that han't been my experience of the t68i at all. Mine seems pretty snappy to use, and opens a book of 120 or so numbers in 1 seconds. The predictive text is much the best that I've used - vastly better than motorola phones', for example.
It also has a large memory for numbers and text messages, and about twice the battery life of other phones I've owned (and of my friend's phones). And that's with bluetooth on purely for the natty blue LED.
I'd have to agree that it's not the most strongly constructed, but that's what you get for lightness, I suppose. I'd add that I've dropped it several times onto hard surfaces, and no harm has come to it.
If I had to critique it, I'd say that it could stand to be heavier (provided the size didn't change) in exchange for an even longer battery life, and the keys aren't all that great.
Overall, though, it's the best phone I've owned by some way, and something like 50% of the people I know have bought them since the first ones started appearing amongst my aquaintances.
And yes, I do know someone who had a more-or-less DOA, but then I know someone who had two from Nokia, so I'm not drawing any QC conclusions.
Working on a television program I had to get a fairly valuable and unique item collected from the states and brought to.uk.
Obviously, I wanted to track this parcel. There's an ongoing problem in that I'm in London, but our head office is in the north, which means that they insist on transferring me (when they will - sometimes they want me to call direct) to an office several hundred miles away. This is (of course) because the database that stores the shipping and billing information isn't national but per-office.
Now in this case I hadn't got a standard tracking number (either through an oversight of the person I booked the collection with, or because they don't use them for international work). This made the sequence run something like this:
Me: Hi, I'd like to track an international parcel, please - the reference I was give is CAR9873930
Courier: Who gave you that? What is it? Who did you book the collection with?
Me: Errr, well can you look it up by my account number? That's 908474.
Courier: No, I'm afraid we need the consignment number, but your account comes up as from a different depot - I'll tranfer you. (Or indeed: "this is their number - I'm not allowed to transfer you")....This repeated three times as I'm tranferred to or ring different branches of the Courier Empire...
Eventually, I reach the office I booked the collection with in the first place (there desn't seem to be a reliable way to get to a particular department directly).
And lo, after only about 35 minutes of wasted time for a one-minute query, the original tracking number works!
I feel very sorry for those that work for the courier company - their job of providing straightforward customer service is hampered at every turn by their IT infrastructure's inability to talk to other systems in the company, or to display data based on any key but the one tracking number it was designed to expect.
Everyone seems agreed that 10.2 is notably faster on G4 hardware, due to UI processing being offloaded onto the GPU (and presumably some quite large degree of optimisation towards the G4's specific processor features).
I'd be really interested to know if a similar speedup is noticeable on G3 machines (and specifically the iBook) as I'm planning to get a 12" iBook soonish (can't afford the PBG4, and it's too damn big anyway).
While I hate to contradict, I've had mixed experience with Dabs - sometimes excellent as you describe, sometimes a bit off (difficulty returning DOA things, confusion about time-to-delivery). Nothing too major, just enough to take the shine off.
The place (UK) I get my stuff from now (and order from for people who ask me to spec machines) is Scan.co.uk. They seem a bit more clueful than Dabs and a bit less box-shifty, have similar prices on most things (certainly close at least) and will build and test (important!) a system for I think 60 quid on top of component prices. That might be enough to remove the price advantage over say Dell, but bear in mind that this is an entirely custom spec. I'd recommend them.
I'd second both points here, and add that Mitsubishi Diamondtron-based monitors are great too. These are mainly branded Mitsubishi or Iiyama and I believe they are technologically similar to Trinitron (presumably Sony's patent must have expired).
I have a 17" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 87TXM dating from I think about 1996, and it's still better than a good 85% of the monitors I see, Trinitron included. If I ever get a job, I'm getting a 22" Diamondtron *immediately*.
I'd agree with you entirely if we didn't live in a society in which celebrity rather than sanity is the key to getting access to the media. While it remains pretty much standard practice to recruit the famous to promote single-issue lunacies to the populus, I'd say pointing out that they can be persuaded to say almost anything is a pretty good satirical goal. Perhaps not the very highest one could aspire to, but worthwhile.
Further hilarity can be found here and there's a discussion forum on all this on Channel 4's site. (Look in the list of forums on the left).
The hysteria surrounding all this has to be seen to be believed - for some reason paedophile terror has really taken off in the UK in the last few years, culminating in hilarious/terrifying events like the attack on the house of a paediatrician by a mob of (presumably semi-literate) vigilantes a while back.
For the record, my mother (56, and a psychotherapist) watched the programme and found it amusing to the point of being life-threatening.
I was talking the other day to a chap I used to work with - he now does pre-sales for $verylargeISPindeed. He mentioned in conversation that their mid-range Sun hosting solution now costs less than the bargain-basement NT/2k alternative. The reason? Their major cost is administration and the Windows machines like to know that you're there. The Sun machines can safely be left alone except when Apache or SSH needs updating.
This would apply equally (given decent hardware) to BSD or carefully chosen Linux installations and would avoid the situation, prevalent at my last employer, of having to employ hordes of expensive but clueless NT admins whose main job was to reboot/rebuild servers that had fallen over.
The advantage of open source to a company is to a great degree the same advantage as UNIX in general - reduced admin costs through stability and ease of administration.
Steff
Re:The army isn't the one we should worry about...
on
EMP Artillery Shells
·
· Score: 1
FWIW, the IRA is widely reputed to have investigated this means of attack against the City of London. Quite why they never went ahead with it, the rumours don't relate, but it certainly seems an attractive attack from their point of view - vast economic damage without killing any civilians, which alienates at least some of their support (or potential support). Does anyone have any more detail on this?
I know FPSs need a simple overall plot to follow, but he could throw in some really evil subplots.
I can't really agree about the plot needing to be simple - Marathon's plot was so baffling (in a good way) that there was an entire website devoted to discussion of wtf was going on. This complemented the gameplay (and in particular the level design, which gave a tremendous sense of real architecture as well as good gamplay space) superbly, and IMHO really lifted the Marathon games above Doom and Quake as a single player experience, even though the technology was only a little ahead of Doom.
Steff
Re:Microsoft tries to stop experimentation with Li
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but it's a pretty abysmal means of running Linux, and makes it tricky to preserve your Linux data when you invitably decide to remove Windows onc and for all. Thus it still has the effect of discouraging experimentation.
Also, what if I wanted to play with, say, the new Plan 9 release? I'm fairly sure that doesn't run from a Windows partition:)
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC Vesselin Bontchev studied this idea some years ago and presented a very good paper explaining why viral propagation of "white hat" code was a daft idea. May have been at EICAR '94 but I've long since lost my copy of proceedings.
Agree! Agree! It's the first game in years that's genuinely had me open-mouthed with delight. The Wii in general is a wonder - my last company was a games developer so we had all the platforms - I doubt if the rest put together got as much play time as the Wii.
Having recently had the misfortune to have to administer a Red Hat Enterprise* Linux box, I can't agree too strongly. It's a joke of a distribution compared to Debian and charging for it only adds insult to injury. If I ever want a wide selection of non-standard outdated packages to test application compatibility or something I'll know just where to look, though.
*as in "Herald of Free Enterprise"
Or could it be that I'm a twat who puts underscores where they don't belong?
*kicks self*
Ignore the .sig - it's ~1 year out of date. Must be an age since I've posted.
To be fair, I'm on a fixed IP (with working reverse DNS) on what must be one of the savviest ISPs on the planet ( http://aaisp.net.uk ) and I'm still seeing all sorts of crud from my fellow users on 81.2.x.x ...
Not to mention the whole "missile propellant == satellite launch propellant" thing.
I note that unlike the t68i pages there's no obvious mention of battery life. I *love* my t68i and the number one toppermost-top feature is the battery. It has essentially removed the main irritation from my use of mobile phones. OTOH, others have reported problems with theirs, so perhaps I'm just a lucky fucker.
This new model, I'm guessing, will be much more like the t300[1] which had all the doodads but sucks as a phone because it has ~50% of the battery life.
Steff
[1] See http://www.sonyericsson.com/t300/
Is there any particular reason you don't just get a generic optical mouse (such as the one, branded "Chic" that I'm using now)? They're functionally nigh-on indistinguishable from the basic MS or Logitech products so far as I can tell, and a fuck of a lot cheaper.
Mine was about a tenner (UK) several months ago.
Steff
http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/
Steff
Since dictionary.com is so reassuring, I'd like to invite you to visit the UK, and refer to the first bloke you see as a slag within his hearing.
Bonus points if you pick significantly bigger and harder than you, or if you refer to his girlfriend as a slag too.
Steff
His name is Benjamin Pell. See, for example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 156062,00.html
Steff
I have to say that that han't been my experience of the t68i at all. Mine seems pretty snappy to use, and opens a book of 120 or so numbers in 1 seconds. The predictive text is much the best that I've used - vastly better than motorola phones', for example.
It also has a large memory for numbers and text messages, and about twice the battery life of other phones I've owned (and of my friend's phones). And that's with bluetooth on purely for the natty blue LED.
I'd have to agree that it's not the most strongly constructed, but that's what you get for lightness, I suppose. I'd add that I've dropped it several times onto hard surfaces, and no harm has come to it.
If I had to critique it, I'd say that it could stand to be heavier (provided the size didn't change) in exchange for an even longer battery life, and the keys aren't all that great.
Overall, though, it's the best phone I've owned by some way, and something like 50% of the people I know have bought them since the first ones started appearing amongst my aquaintances.
And yes, I do know someone who had a more-or-less DOA, but then I know someone who had two from Nokia, so I'm not drawing any QC conclusions.
Steff
Working on a television program I had to get a fairly valuable and unique item collected from the states and brought to.uk.
...This repeated three times as I'm tranferred to or ring different branches of the Courier Empire...
Obviously, I wanted to track this parcel. There's an ongoing problem in that I'm in London, but our head office is in the north, which means that they insist on transferring me (when they will - sometimes they want me to call direct) to an office several hundred miles away. This is (of course) because the database that stores the shipping and billing information isn't national but per-office.
Now in this case I hadn't got a standard tracking number (either through an oversight of the person I booked the collection with, or because they don't use them for international work). This made the sequence run something like this:
Me: Hi, I'd like to track an international parcel, please - the reference I was give is CAR9873930
Courier: Who gave you that? What is it? Who did you book the collection with?
Me: Errr, well can you look it up by my account number? That's 908474.
Courier: No, I'm afraid we need the consignment number, but your account comes up as from a different depot - I'll tranfer you. (Or indeed: "this is their number - I'm not allowed to transfer you").
Eventually, I reach the office I booked the collection with in the first place (there desn't seem to be a reliable way to get to a particular department directly).
And lo, after only about 35 minutes of wasted time for a one-minute query, the original tracking number works!
I feel very sorry for those that work for the courier company - their job of providing straightforward customer service is hampered at every turn by their IT infrastructure's inability to talk to other systems in the company, or to display data based on any key but the one tracking number it was designed to expect.
Steff
Cheers for that - exactly the reassurance I needed.
I'm planning 640M. This (2k/FreeBSD) machine is 2 1/2 years old and has 384M. I know the value of having enough memory.
Steff
Everyone seems agreed that 10.2 is notably faster on G4 hardware, due to UI processing being offloaded onto the GPU (and presumably some quite large degree of optimisation towards the G4's specific processor features).
I'd be really interested to know if a similar speedup is noticeable on G3 machines (and specifically the iBook) as I'm planning to get a 12" iBook soonish (can't afford the PBG4, and it's too damn big anyway).
Steff
The place (UK) I get my stuff from now (and order from for people who ask me to spec machines) is Scan.co.uk. They seem a bit more clueful than Dabs and a bit less box-shifty, have similar prices on most things (certainly close at least) and will build and test (important!) a system for I think 60 quid on top of component prices. That might be enough to remove the price advantage over say Dell, but bear in mind that this is an entirely custom spec. I'd recommend them.
Steff
I'd second both points here, and add that Mitsubishi Diamondtron-based monitors are great too. These are mainly branded Mitsubishi or Iiyama and I believe they are technologically similar to Trinitron (presumably Sony's patent must have expired).
I have a 17" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 87TXM dating from I think about 1996, and it's still better than a good 85% of the monitors I see, Trinitron included. If I ever get a job, I'm getting a 22" Diamondtron *immediately*.
Steff
So, bugs permitting, the prior art may well be widespread - see: http://www.avp.ch/avpve/boot/koh.stm
The encryption algorithm used is IDEA, I believe.
Steff
I'd agree with you entirely if we didn't live in a society in which celebrity rather than sanity is the key to getting access to the media. While it remains pretty much standard practice to recruit the famous to promote single-issue lunacies to the populus, I'd say pointing out that they can be persuaded to say almost anything is a pretty good satirical goal. Perhaps not the very highest one could aspire to, but worthwhile.
Steff
The hysteria surrounding all this has to be seen to be believed - for some reason paedophile terror has really taken off in the UK in the last few years, culminating in hilarious/terrifying events like the attack on the house of a paediatrician by a mob of (presumably semi-literate) vigilantes a while back.
For the record, my mother (56, and a psychotherapist) watched the programme and found it amusing to the point of being life-threatening.
Steff
I was talking the other day to a chap I used to work with - he now does pre-sales for $verylargeISPindeed. He mentioned in conversation that their mid-range Sun hosting solution now costs less than the bargain-basement NT/2k alternative. The reason? Their major cost is administration and the Windows machines like to know that you're there. The Sun machines can safely be left alone except when Apache or SSH needs updating.
This would apply equally (given decent hardware) to BSD or carefully chosen Linux installations and would avoid the situation, prevalent at my last employer, of having to employ hordes of expensive but clueless NT admins whose main job was to reboot/rebuild servers that had fallen over.
The advantage of open source to a company is to a great degree the same advantage as UNIX in general - reduced admin costs through stability and ease of administration.
Steff
FWIW, the IRA is widely reputed to have investigated this means of attack against the City of London. Quite why they never went ahead with it, the rumours don't relate, but it certainly seems an attractive attack from their point of view - vast economic damage without killing any civilians, which alienates at least some of their support (or potential support). Does anyone have any more detail on this?
Steff
I can't really agree about the plot needing to be simple - Marathon's plot was so baffling (in a good way) that there was an entire website devoted to discussion of wtf was going on. This complemented the gameplay (and in particular the level design, which gave a tremendous sense of real architecture as well as good gamplay space) superbly, and IMHO really lifted the Marathon games above Doom and Quake as a single player experience, even though the technology was only a little ahead of Doom.
Steff
Also, what if I wanted to play with, say, the new Plan 9 release? I'm fairly sure that doesn't run from a Windows partition :)
Steff